


A treatise on owls, as written under a pseud

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Bookstores, F/F, Fire Walk With Me - Freeform, Gen, Helping out, Maps, Shifting Identities, Types of Knowledge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Albert, she was sure, would appreciate the “Tammy walks into a bookstore” setup. But the events of that day were for her and her alone.
Relationships: Tammy Preston & Laura Palmer, Tammy Preston/Laura Palmer
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A treatise on owls, as written under a pseud

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



Tammy Preston loved old bookstores. Tammy Preston felt one with any given stash of printed pages, be it the limited, glossy selection of an airport kiosk or the wider, glossier rows of best-sellers at the mall, but there was an art to the chaos of overcrowded shelves where the latest releases muscled in on geological strata of forgotten, abandoned books. The real-life equivalent of a Wikipedia dive, she called them: that is, the best way to spend an afternoon.

A collection of Gothic tales from the midwest sat next to an inquiry on the mass hysteria behind the dancing plague of the 16th century, Gengis Khan’s modern influence, funny anecdotes based on the periodic table which should have been at home among the pop-sci shelves if not for the word “history” in the title.

A woman contemplated a nearby shelf, going through the titles with her finger, word by word.

“What does it take…” she said to herself and began her search anew, methodical but aimless. “I thought I’d knew it. What’s it called. Muscle memory. It’s a fucking Easter eggs hunt in here.”

Tammy’s heels tapped an odd rhythm. The stranger turned her head, looked through her.

“You an angel? You work here? I can’t find a map.”

In that moment, Tammy knew, she could not say no, as if the world had shrunk to just her and that stranger in a corner of a dusty basement, and one of them had to play the angel under some old impenetrable rules, and the other woman was temporarily incapacitated, so it fell to her.

“It got pictures,” the woman continued. “And… a noise? Like this noise.” She made a sound like an electrical humming.

She fell silent, expecting an answer. The electrical humming continued, reverberated through the dusty basement and the world was vast again, past that little corner, although maybe a little different, a little sharper. Tammy lowered her book to give her her full attention, and found herself facing a memory. The curve of the woman’s eyebrows, the small pout that accompanied her every expression, even the old smile she put on as a seventeen-year-old prom queen in that photograph in Tammy’s files, those features she’d hesitantly caressed on faded photographic paper were real, living and breathing in front of her.

“Are you…” Tammy felt the name too heavy on her tongue. It could not get out.

Steps clicked on the dusty floor.

“I am the librarian,” said a voice behind them, the woman’s same syrupy voice, Laura Palmer’s voice without the static of decades-old cassette tapes, but not aimless, not lost. She dressed in black, red lipstick, blonde curls framing her face. “Who needed a map?”

Behind her, Tammy saw the bookstore’s customers meet and chat around the aisles and they were all one, all Laura (the men sometimes raised a mask over their face, ashamed, maybe, of their essence). “There are words missing. Burnt out,” one of them said nearby. “Unfulfilled legacies,” her companion agreed. “They may be found deeper down.”

“Excuse me,” said another, walking up to the librarian. “Is there a poem as lovely as a tree?” She got her answer, private, whispered in her hear, and continued on her way.

“I may need a map. For this?” Tammy’s nervous laughter rang hollow in what she recognized to be a moment of truth, an intimate lifting of the veil she had been studying for years but never touching, never treading. “A mental map? To know what’s going on?”

“You will want to set fire to that,” said the librarian. “You will catch fire. The map would then be truthful.”

“But I won’t. I will not catch fire.”

“If you do not scream. Then someone else will.”  
“And that someone is you.” Tammy cocked her head in slow understanding, as the flow of that conversation seeped into her despite the obscurity of their words, of her own words. She still held onto her books as a protection. Beyond them, in the far, dark corners of the bookstore, a flame burst and crumbled to ashes. Someone cried. “I... am sorry,” Tammy said.

“That is a start.”

Laura Palmer existed in billions of times and billions of lives, refracted in the dark aisles and beyond, and this woman dressed in black took them all within her and reached out to touch Tammy’s face with a curious caress and kiss her next to her lips. Tammy wondered if this was what it was like to catch fire; she wished the kiss had brushed her lips, she wished she could run her hand through the woman’s curls and tell her she felt for her with all the earnestness words had ever allowed her. But she knew, in the distant way which was the way of her life, that this Laura’s touch had come from a cosmic distance, carrying the smallest of sparks through the void as a gift and an encouragement. Laura awaited at the end, underneath it all. She had told her how to fall past the layers. It had been Laura’s way, walking with fire: it could be done.

It could be done by Laura, who fell long ago and transcended her fall, carrying now a sacred glimmer in her eyes. That path was lined in ashes.

“Wait a minute,” said Tammy, unsure on her feet, gripping her books with white knuckles. “Wait a minute.” She stumbled through her words and fell silent.

Laura caressed her good-bye. “Make your map, then. Deep space is very cold,” she said, and wandered into the darkness.

Her words played over and over in Tammy’s mind, too many meanings and none at once, echoing with a sadness she had not perceived at first, mesmerized by the woman’s absolute otherworldly presence. It would take her weeks to write them down and trace her schemes, look for the value of fire in all the worlds’ mythologies and find out that it was indeed as scary as it seemed. It would take her months to trace a map from her mind to the place where those words made sense, follow it, see them lie on the same plane at once and form themselves a map, and go further down that way, through the years, tracing her own lines, bridges, stairs that would not burn. A path that a woman on fire (not Laura, perhaps, but a Laura) may climb to find her way home.

“Hey, angel?” called the woman next to her, her voice not so syrupy anymore, hair short and black, a good contrast with her pink sheepskin jacket. “They don’t sell maps of the city anymore, do they? How’s a girl meant to get around these days?”

Tammy blinked and took her phone out, maps app on the ready.

“Where do you need to go, ma’am?”


End file.
